idiosyncreant: cartoon avatar of blue eyed redhead with curly hair, underdyed with black (Default)
Watched PotC: On Stranger Tides today--it was lots of fun! Had all the things I liked about the first movie without muddying it with the things I didn't like about the second... Beautiful locations, too.

I'm fighting a deep lack of time-constraints right now, and mixed up with a severe lack of faith in myself as a writer...I've been getting a lot of fiber crafts done.

:loser town:

Oh, and keeping up with my K-pop crushes, because for some reason that has the power to cheer me up.

...iiiii don't get it but I'm taking what I can get at this point. XP

idiosyncreant: cartoon avatar of blue eyed redhead with curly hair, underdyed with black (Default)

I figured out what's wrong with Vigil. Yes,
AGAIN.

It doesn't have enough plot material (yet) to actually MAKE a novel. And this confirms something most evidence has been pointing to: I started writing it before I was ready.

My worst fear is that setting something aside for too long will let it die, but with this as the alternative...

Anyway, I have to choreograph another whole half of a story, if not more when I'm already what seems like halfway in.

And ignore the voice that says, OK, but is this story even worth it?

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

idiosyncreant: cartoon avatar of blue eyed redhead with curly hair, underdyed with black (Default)
not to be a forever-alone amount of in love with Flower Boy Ramyun Shop or anything, but...

YOU GUYS

The latest episode was SO good. SO GOOD.


It's the end of the third week, right? We're finally getting into the part where the heroine is facing up to her inadequacies and how she's been stifling her true self into something else, and this then brings the hero into confrontation with the true her--that he's been minorly attracted to all this time. BLAM.

There are two different scenes where she's trying to give him a clean break, and...we get to see Jung Il-Woo's excellence.

The positive reviews of his talent didn't really mean much while he was playing the fun spoiled-rich-boy bits, but in this one you get to see his heart breaking while he doesn't even really know WHY. Or what, even.



Of course, there was also boy-bickering and the set-up of the three rivals and the heroine all deciding to go in together to make the Ramen Shop a success, and the band-of-misfits dynamic is already slaying me.

The frenemy-boys are shaping up to be particularly hard on me, since there's no straight-up nice guy, straight-up clingy guy... This reminds me of the intersecting-triangles of Sunkyunkwan. Where you know from a certain point that you're going to break your heart over every single character, because you love them all, and they have conflicting goals.

Anyway, it was an excellent palliative against confronting the fact that there is no way to put all the awesome of Letters to My Nemesis into the query. Apparently, I actually wrote subplots...
idiosyncreant: cartoon avatar of blue eyed redhead with curly hair, underdyed with black (Default)
HOLY CRAP WHERE WAS THIS
when I was looking for it to post it weeks ago, I could have sworn it was disappeared.

Alas.

step one of Personal Taste - Good Parts Version

I am currently typing up Vigil, what I've eked out on in in the last month or so.

...also just realized it would have been the perfect NaNo project, if I wasn't so unsure I could ever actually write more words for it.

Now I'm not so afraid of that...I'm wondering if it's too late, and that is madness.

Prolly.
idiosyncreant: cartoon avatar of blue eyed redhead with curly hair, underdyed with black (Default)


The Luxery of Red by tonysadoval    his gallery is full of treasures, if you like the mood of this one; found another old favorite that was by him in there! le ignoramus

I wish more magazines in the world had pretty art like this on their covers--it's disturbing enough to be okay for adults, isn't it?

***

I'm thinking of making November my NaNoReviseMo. I'm  thinking about doing it with a manuscript that's been drawer-sitting for years, the novel I brought to the VP workshop, and then spent a year hammering at before giving up in disgust at my ability to revise it.

I know how, now.

And I'm done (almost) with the latest draft of Nemesis, which means waiting for the next round of betas, and trying not to kill myself over query pain. So why not? Writing Vigil is still piecemeal. I think it's not going to be very fluid at any near point in time, either.

This book seems to come in episodes, and I'm going to see if I can just work with it...

It could also be that the Nemesis bug isn't out of my head. This happened with Carnie's Conspiracy, too, I think, a slump in all other projects until I'd got it really revised and ready to go off and be spurned by agents...
idiosyncreant: cartoon avatar of blue eyed redhead with curly hair, underdyed with black (Default)
Okay. The new novel that was starting to talk to me a couple of weeks ago?

Has now spilt its guts. I may have a couple months, if I'm lucky. A few weeks if I'm not.


DANGIT, GIRL, I want to write Vigil first! And then Archivalist! I have a backlog, why can't you just queue up?



Because that is not the way this works. Obviously.



emo by LittleVampCZ
idiosyncreant: cartoon avatar of blue eyed redhead with curly hair, underdyed with black (Default)
Found Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on the library's DVD shelf!

Got it out to encourage this behavior. ;)

Also, it has bonus features.



In other news, my little novel is still running circles around me, but it's starting to feel twice as exciting, even while I painfully retrace my steps.

The leading man's tongue is getting sharper, the leading girl's making him mad without knowing it, and when we get to the actual plot, I have my PTSD books here to help be really break them.

You know. The usual.




I looked up the Prohibition, of all things, to find out where it started today. Splitting the United States up for an alternate history landscape was a really bright idea, but probably not playing to my strengths. I'd like to proactively thank Wikipedia for making this possible...

What did you look up on Wiki today?
idiosyncreant: cartoon avatar of blue eyed redhead with curly hair, underdyed with black (Default)
Today [livejournal.com profile] sartorias  posted about the emergence of genre-blending as acceptable. I was the first to comment, but it wasn't a particularly great insight-- then I struck upon the thing I really wanted to say:

One of the things I particularly enjoy is where a novel has the feeling of a certain milieu and the underlying structure of another. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel is one of the examples I always think of first in this.

Rosemary Clement-Moore's The Splendor Falls fuses the cheeky YA protagonist with a Southern Gothic plot and setting, which felt very exciting.*

One of the big draws for Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief and its sequels, I think, is that it takes place in a world recognizable from Greek and Byzantine history, but doesn't have the distance you might expect from high fantasy, instead much more like the historical novels that take you into every day life and a normal person's view of it. While still having encounters with the gods, high political stakes, and adventure-peril.




Recently I've just devoured Ilona Andrews' Magic Bites series, and it has the urban fantasy variant that really gets me, where the world has become unfamiliar, yet you catch glimpses of something you know. The Criminal Minds style horror of some of the facets of that world are almost too much for me, but it's not as wearing as the steady grind of many other UF books because it's not treated flippantly. The narrator is sorrowful, not cavalier.




For me, really, being "straight up" [insert whatever] is boring--but maybe because I tend to associate that with being one-dimensional. All really good books blend the author's own diverging interests and story-loves, I think.

So something can be the pinnacle, epitome, of a genre, and it's still going to be something with more to offer than just the genre norm.

I am fighting to put two different strains of story DNA into Vigil right now: superhero adventure with paranormal/chick-lit. And yeah, it's kind of a brawl in here. But that's just the kind of thing I'm drawn to in a story.


Is it just me? I am very clever at reading my theories into everything, and when I look at say, The Magic Thief, I can't think of what exactly it blends, I just know it's unlike anything else I've read.
In which case I am quite likely just expanding the criteria into "writer is talented so the book sounds different" territory.



*I have to lay hands on a copy of Texas Gothic, by Clement-Moore--theoretically, the library will hand one to me, but...
idiosyncreant: cartoon avatar of blue eyed redhead with curly hair, underdyed with black (Default)
I had a new piece of an idea slide into a story that's been waiting in the eaves for a long time, today.

If you don't know what I'm talking about it, will be hard to explain.
If you do, you may understand the moment of free-fall terror and happiness I tasted, just briefly.

The original idea is a concept, one of those sweeping, epic frames for ... for SOMETHING and you don't know quite what, because that's all it is, a framework.

Today a character stepped in, or rather the situation the character is in, which sometimes is much more important to me.


...meanwhile, back at the ranch, I wrote a few new sentences on Vigil, and retrofitted in about a page of information. I worked fiercely on poetry and online stuff most of the day. Wrote two new poems, both with potential, both very different.




Do stories sit in dark eaves of your mind collecting selections of the oddments you toss in that direction?
I am in love with my attic metaphors, but I have a fondness for them as often the most historical place of the house, and their usual shabby-genteel musk.

I just love metaphors, really.


Also, this story that may be hatching? Or may hibernate another 3 years, waiting for the next piece? Is kind of about incarnate metaphors.
/thematic circularity

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